


Learn to Love You

by shoesatplaces



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Awkward Crush, Confusion, F/M, Getting Together, Near Future, Not Actually Unrequited Love, just not in love yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 12:47:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20407993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shoesatplaces/pseuds/shoesatplaces
Summary: Basically Nick and Cassie realizing that they are in love or will be in love at different times. Chapter 1, Cassie third person POV, Cassie is way underage, but theres nothing untoward. Chapter 2, Nick first person POV, Cassie is still underage but less so, and STILL nothing happens, because Nick is Nick.





	1. Keys

**Author's Note:**

> Look! Its my first multi-chapter story. Sortof. I wrote chapter one quite some time ago, and only just recently was able to make myself sit down and finish it, and in doing so realized it kindof fit in with a different piece that I had been working on more recently and decided to post them together. There are definitely a couple of inconsistencies, so please bear with me/it. Also if you find any typos please let me know. I've done all the editing and revising myself, so I probably missed something but, hopefully not. Anyway thanks again for checking it out!

Nick did this thing, that she had Seen since she was little, where he kept his keys clipped to his belt loop (the one on the left, just far enough around that it hangs in that blurry space where hip ends and butt begins), so that they create this extra step of moving them before sitting down to avoid discomfort. He started it when he was a teenager, just after leaving the last foster home and he actually had more than one key to carry. He was all of fifteen and trying (and generally succeeding) to seem older. He wore, almost exclusively, white crew necks and jeans, and his keys jangled when he walked. He came across as tough, in a River Phoenix Stand By Me sort of way.  


That’s not to say that he wasn’t tough. He was. His father had been murdered in front of him and he was still a pretty functional ‘adult’. He wasn’t gonna shoot you if you questioned him, but it wasn’t NOT in his interest if you thought that he might, so he didn't mind when people seemed to think that he would. This was not the work of the keys. The keys had absolutely nothing to do with it, actually, but they were as carefully cultivated as anything else about him. They were part of the image, but Cassie had never been able to fully imagine the jangling until she met him. Somehow hearing them was both the most comforting and jarring thing about finally meeting him. His voice was expected. His laugh was contagious. His footsteps were silent, but the whole of his walk was decidedly not. She could always tell where he was, and when he stopped moving, because of the keys. She developed a bit of an obsession regarding them, if only because she appreciated the semi-privacy they afforded her. You can carefully ignore someone, even if you’re in a hotel room, or just a bedroom, as long as you can hear them when something changes. And she did, because she was a loner through and through, and had never in her life spent so much time in the immediate proximity of another person, even her mother.  


That was not the only reason for her obsession, if she was honest. She also found the attitude that they helped build sexy as hell. She had not been able to identify this particular aspect until very recently, which was good because the loudmouth that she was (and still is) would have been hard pressed to keep quiet about it. She could see it now: Obnoxious, brazen thirteen year old her, noticing keys on his (admittedly perfect) slouched jeans, with his somehow not tight but still fitted looking shirt, just barging into his apartment, going to the fridge and taking a bite of his chicken only to look up and say “Wow you’re hotter than I expected.” He would've pushed her right out the door, do not pass go, do not collect the chicken. Just. Gone.  


She would've walked back in when he opened the door a few seconds later when he remembered she had his chicken. Then she would've introduced herself properly, like she had Seen. He would've remained uncomfortable for… ever, basically, and it would've been fine. Cassies entire life had been uncomfortable. Of course, none of that mattered because that’s not how things had gone down. She had introduced herself the way she had Seen, because she had, until that point in her life, rarely had visions where she actually Saw herself, like an out-of-body experience. Even her thirteen year old self had had the self awareness to stick to the script when the universe clearly had plans.  


And, of course, the lack of any form of sexual awakening whatsoever. Being with Nick had felt very much like being alone, together, back then. She didn't really even register the fact that he was a MAN, more that he was male, if that made sense. Like, his maleness hadn't mattered until the manliness overtook it.  


She had Seen things, sometimes, that appeared to be YEARS in the future, that seemed to imply that maybe things would go that way. A future vision of looking over at an older Nick, and catching that look, the way people look at someone they’re in love with when they’ve momentarily forgotten that other people exist. Seeing a different look through the steam from behind a glass shower door while he brushed his teeth. She just, for quite some time, had missed how they got to that point. It was unfathomable. The concept that they might someday even have time to care. Realistically she shouldn’t have time to care NOW.  


And yet. She had glanced up from her cross legged position on the motel bed in time to see the bathroom door open. He flung water from his hair as steam tumbled out around him -_a seconds interruption and she knows that he’ll ask her to cut it tomorrow_\- and he Moved his shirt to himself from across the room (for whatever reason his jeans, and the damned keys, went with him into the bathroom for his shower, but his shirt had to be cool when he got out, so it was left in the main room). And somehow this scene that she had seen basically every day for years, in a hundred different shithole rooms and moods and indefinite variables, for some reason sitting here on this disgusting bed, in THIS shithole room, she feels want hit her like a truck.  


She’s frozen for a moment -_she Sees legs wrapped around his waist, a flash of clasped hands that look suspiciously like theirs against sheets_\- before she scrambles for her sketchbook. She usually mocks him for his vanity, or his pickiness, or his habitual routine, but she’s frankly speechless and can't find a scenario in which her big mouth doesn't give her away unless she's drawing. Cause sure, maybe they fall in love later, but today they don't have time for her to take a feels trip, or for him to have a crisis.  
She hears him walk closer to her, and his shadow blocks her lamplight.  
“You’re blocking my light.”  
“Good. Then you don't have to see your crappy artistry.”  
She snorts, but goes back to her drawing. Something is weird with her mom, lately, and she intends to get to the bottom of it.


	2. Aruba

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I have a kindof sortof headcannon (in that I think its a headcannon and I haven't found anything to tell me its not?) that Cassie has a habit of Seeing herself talking to Nick about something, and then forgetting to actually talk to him about it. Small hijinks and insecurities. Whatevs.

“What are you talking about, Cassie?” 

“What do you mean what am I talking about? We had this conversation like last week.” 

“I don't think so. I definitely would've remembered plans to go to Aruba. Cassie, I don't even know where that is!” 

“It's a constituent of the Netherlands off the coast of Venezuela. It's a really cool place, you were t- Oohh I fucked up. See, this is what happens when I run out of Sharpies.” She looked at me with accusatory eyes. 

“Don't give me that look. If you would hurry up and turn eighteen you wouldn't ever HAVE to run out of Sharpies. And it's not my fault you got so excited about your goofy vacation that you forgot to actually talk to me about the vacation.” 

“This time it is your fault, though. I asked you several times. Besides, it's not a vacation. There are resources there. Getting to hang out in gauzy dresses and board shorts while we do our job is just a plus.” She nails me with that look, the hot one that tells me all about her thoughts on dresses I can see through and board shorts with stupid patterns. I groan and put my heavy cargo shorts on the top of my suitcase. 

I snorted quietly while I thought of this conversation while, you guessed it, on a plane to Aruba. I was “totally all about it” (read: mostly) after Cassie got around to actually telling me why we were going there, and what else we could do after we finished the business portion of the trip. Cassie advocated a “work hard, play harder” lifestyle, which recently included the clause: especially at Nicks expense. 

Well. I say recently. She had started acting weird about me around the time we discovered evidence that suggested that if her mother was still in the Divisions custody, she was almost definitely not alive. I thought that she was probably just processing her grief as badly as she processed everything else in her life. Which was to be expected, she was what we liked to call ‘passionate’ (aka dramatic), in addition to being only fifteen. It's an outrageously young age at which to become an orphan, and moreover, her sole purpose of living from the age of eleven had been retrieving her mother. She had suddenly found herself a rebel without a cause, as it were. 

I let it go. And it went on, until finally, one night not long after she had turned sixteen, she confronted me. APPARENTLY, the grand scheme future had changed, in more that she no longer so much as saw her mother. According to her Sight, the current train on which we barreled towards the future, ultimate destination unknown, would at some point stop to pick up additional cargo in the form of a relationship. Between us. As you can imagine, then it became my turn to be weird as hell, because 1) I learned that I could no longer trust my brain, because she was sixteen fucking years old damnit; and 2) Damnit why can't men and women just have regular friendships without some kind of weirdass tension!? She soon tired of this and angrily confronted me yet again a week or so later. I had been mindlessly watching National Geographic when she threw herself down on the couch next to me, and it appeared that my leaping up had been the last straw. 

“God damnit Nick!” she exploded. “Would you fucking stop it?! Look, I know telling you about the things I've Seen is weird. I know it's uncomfortable to maybe think of me like that, I know you have this whole weird complex now about how you must be a predator or something, I know, okay?! Imagine being me, I had to actually See it, and trust me when I say that Watching that was just as uncomfortable as watching a sex scene with your parents. But just. Jesus. I’m still me. You’re still you. Neither of us actively have any weird attractions to each other, so just stop it. You’ve been literally the one constant of my entire life, so please. Don’t.” 

She looked at me, and I was hit with so much guilt that I veritably collapsed back to my seat. She crawled over and smashed herself into her usual spot against my chest, under my arm, and everything had been fine after that. 

Until about four months ago. 

I can be honest. I may have inadvertently started it. We were cooking in the shitty month-to-month lease apartment we had at the time (choosing “Destroy the Division Thoroughly” over “Destroy the Division Quickly” had its perks, aka, they didn't look for us as often) and she was sitting on the counter where I needed to be. So I thoughtlessly picked her up and Moved her to a different part of the counter. Her eyes boggled, then she recovered, quirked an eyebrow, and said “I don't know where you got the idea that it’s acceptable to manhandle me.” I responded naturally. “I dunno I just get the feeling you’d be into it.” 

I froze, and kept my back to her. That was a natural response TO A GIRLFRIEND, not to Cassie. I turned slowly, and observed a peculiar expression overtake her face. It was peculiar because her face didn't change: her eyes were wide, her mouth was partially open, there was a light flush across her cheeks. But I felt I could read every thought she had as she thought it, so clearly they might have scrolled behind her eyes in text. I saw her reach a decision, and then: 

“Oh really. So you’ve thought about it?” 

“No.” I hadn't. I was a grown-ass man. She was seventeen. I had decidedly NOT thought about it. “I just know you.” 

She leveled me with a look that was unreadable, except for the overwhelming disappointment and boredom. She knew as well as I did what the future held. Better, really, considering she had Seen it first hand. I sneakily snagged her sketchbook while she was in the shower later that night. If we had any secrets from each other this would be a tremendous breach of confidence; as it was it was much like snooping through someones phone when your thumbprint worked: allowed, but unnecessary. But I, much like an insecure girlfriend, was looking for one thing, and one thing only. Unfortunately, I got exactly what I asked for, and found several depictions of us, each more sensual and meaningful than the last, and I realized suddenly that whether she had admitted it or not, there was a level of desire involved. If that desire was a biological reaction to the imagery or an emotional one to the content, I didn't know, but it was discernible within the sketches, and suddenly it occurred to me that she loved me. We weren’t just a team, all we had, we weren’t just comfortable and satisfied, when she chose to stay after discovering that we weren’t working towards rescuing her mother any longer, that was a confession. She may not have been IN love with me yet, but she definitely loved me. I realized I had been staring at her face, smashed into the window where she had fallen asleep. 

Things had been different since then. For one, she made my life hell, in the best way. Her already daringly short skirts became scandalous. Her thin shirts became barely there, and I can not even begin to elaborate on the types of underwear that I found in my laundry. How they got there eludes me, we do separate loads because: “Your stupid cargo shorts keep tearing my clothes!” “Yeah well your undergarments make me uncomfortable!” “Oh grow up.” “You first” (it's called compromise). There was an undercurrent to almost everything we said. I caught her eyeing me with intent. The hand I had usually rested on her shoulder protectively moved without my awareness to her back, I found myself standing closer to her around other men… In short, things were tense, and it was awful. 

Not that I would've traded it for anything. This weirdness gave me time to… want her. Or learn to want her. Even though I wasn’t supposed to. Yet? I mean, I was, it was in the cards, it's just… How does one move from viewing someone as their responsibility, or their friend, to someone that they had romantic inclinations towards. Not to mention my weird complex. I mean, for years she had been my responsibility, effectively; just because we saved each others ass on a regular basis didn't mean that I wasn’t the adult. I made sure she had food, and clothes, and some form of education. I took care of her when she was sick. I mean, I bought her sanitary products, for crying out loud. I was just glad for both of us that Kira was around at that point in time because… Yeah. In my defense I didn't have sisters, my mother had died when I was a child, I knew NOTHING about women. 

Whatever… I felt that I couldn't trust myself, somehow. Like, had I just been waiting, conditioning her, all these years, until she turned eighteen and it was suddenly acceptable? Fuck that. The fact that I was starting to feel strangely now, when she was still a minor. The fact that SHE SAW IT when she was fucking fifteen. God. I was sick, and I hated myself. 

All of this was not enough to keep me from continuing down the same vein, though. She woke up when we landed and I went back to ‘normal’ and she of course was never not normal so it was good. We talked to our contacts and utilized our resources and schmoozed with some new people in the name of business. Then we graduated to our weird little open air bungalow (it was secluded and would have been annoying to get to-and-fro during the business portion of our trip) and I totally lost my cool, to be honest. The place was incredible. I didn't ask how she found it or how she managed to secure it because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what she had to do. It was basically private, on some probably outrageously expensive resort property. The atmosphere was unbelievable, and the water even more so. My dumbass became seventeen again and as soon as we walked in the front door (why it had a door I didn't know, because it didn't really have any other walls) I whooped and stripped down to my cargo shorts as I ran through, leaping over the outdoor couch and into the water. It actually hurt because while I envisioned myself jumping off a pier into the water, it was really more like jumping into a kiddie pool. I stayed smashed into the sand where I landed while I heard Cassie's laugh ringing out behind me. She had apparently put on her swimsuit that morning, because when I finally dug myself out of my shame-and-quicksand landing pad, she was folding up her clothes and using the stairs to get into the water, like the adult she wasn’t. I realized that she had probably seen me embarrass myself since not long after we had decided to come here, and neglected to mention it. Which like, I understood, but also, rude. 

It was a neat place. I looked around as I waded out further and sat down in the surf. I called it ‘surf’ only because it was ocean water, not because there were any real waves. The water ranged from waist deep to armpit deep, without my ever really even feeling the water come at me? It was peculiar, but I was a fan. And it was CLEAR. Like, my dad and I spent a lot of time in Cali, I knew clear water, it wasn’t like I had never seen water that wasn’t the cesspool that is the Yangtze. But this was another level. Looking out I felt like I could see everything, and I thought about the divers… somewhere, that would try to dive down in some other freakishly clear water and drown before they ever reached the bottom. I waited for a swell and swam closer to Cassie. 

“You look like a frog when you do that.” 

“It's a breast-stroke.” 

“It's a lazy breast-stroke at best, but that’s generous.” 

I shrugged. She was right, after all. I was an excellent not-drowner, but that did not mean that I was a good swimmer. I brought my knees up and loosely put my arms around them, then looked toward the sunset. Cassie murmured “Do it for the gram” and I snorted. I heard her phone shutter anyway and thought about Moving it out of her hands and into the water. She gasped and smacked my arm a moment later and I laughed outright. 

I wasn’t certain I would ever get over how she could have whole conversations with me, without me. Would we someday get engaged without my knowledge? Would we have little super-powered babies that I didn't know about until very, VERY late in the process? Would we be picking names before I clued in? I stopped myself. It didn't matter. Because she was, again, seventeen; I was not thinking about any intimate parts of my body coming into contact with her body, because that was inappropriate. 

And not the point. The point is, while we were having a grand old time in Aruba, the conversation we almost didn't have lingered in the back of my mind constantly. It wasn’t like it made me not trust her or anything stupid like that, it was just wild. And I understood, as much as I could. When she Sees herself with me, it IS me, it's just a me that hasn’t existed yet. While I tended to think she could stand to be a little more direct, I also understood how hard it was for her. She processed, on average, twice as many interactions as I did in a day, but she also had to figure out which scenarios are most likely, when they will happen, and whether or not she is supposed to prompt them when they do. Add in keeping us alive without altering the Grand Timeline, and she had her work cut out for her. It was just weird. On the one hand I felt like she should be more adept at it? Like, she was born with this power, shouldn’t it be a little less overwhelming? But on the other hand I felt acutely aware of my own shortcomings. Which was the crux of the issue. I was a good enough Mover, I Moved the things I intended to without incident, but it wasn’t EASY. For my dad it was easy. For good Movers it's easy. Cassie's Sight was chaotic but easy, in that it just came to her, these days. And sure, I could practice more and get stronger, but I just… wished I was gifted. The vanity of wishing to be gifted among the gifted was not lost on me. 

I just… wanted to be enough. For her. Like all these years I only needed to be enough for myself, really. She was part of it, of course, but she wasn’t PART of it. I needed to be enough for myself so that she could be enough for herself. And of course, we relied heavily on each other, but it's different. Being in a relationship is different. And I knew we weren’t there yet, but we were definitely closer than we had ever been, and not just because time only moves forward. I could feel it. The depth, and the intensity were different. Instead of fighting like hell for each other because we were all we HAD, we were fighting like hell for each other because we were all we WANTED. 

I felt my shoulders relax. 

I realized that the feeling I had been struggling with was, once it was boiled down, insecurity. Insecurity in her feelings for me being real and not just ‘destined’ or conditioned or something. Insecurity in my own intentions being decent. Not knowing if we wanted each other or just perceived that we needed each other. I wanted her for everything that she was, and could be, and for every time she was gonna be a pain in my ass. She had been my everything since the moment she walked through the door and ate my leftover chicken. I just hadn't known it yet. 

I wasn’t sure how my epiphany changed anything but I felt her still beside me, and when she did look over me her eyes were wide. I kept my eyes on the sunset.


End file.
